Bestselling novelist J. Courtney Sullivan will be talking about her most recent book, "The Engagements," at the Westport Library on Sunday, June 8, and at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison on Monday, June 9.

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Bestselling novelist J. Courtney Sullivan will be talking about her...

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The life of pioneering advertising woman Frances Gerety, who created the 'A Diamond is Forever" campaign for De Beers, is one of the five plot threads involving changing American notions of romance and marriage in "The Engagements," the most recent novel by J. Courtney Sullivan.

In her follow-up to "Commencement" and "Maine," best-selling novelist J. Courtney Sullivan decided to mix biography and history with fiction.

"The Engagements" (Vintage, $15.95) tells the story of pioneering advertising woman Frances Gerety, who created the slogan "A Diamond is Forever" in 1947 while working for the N.W. Ayer advertising agency in Philadelphia.

Gerety and N.W. Ayer -- and their client, DeBeers -- were crucial in convincing many generations of American women (and men) that a diamond engagement ring is an essential part of romance and marriage.

In her juicy 500-page book, Sullivan combines the story of Gerety's struggles in the male-dominated advertising business with four parallel love stories that examine romance and marriage over the past half-century.

"She invented an idea that then became true," Sullivan said of Gerety in a recent phone interview. Gerety's immortal ad line was dubbed "the slogan of the century" by Advertising Age in 1999.

The novelist decided that mixing Gerety with the story of a ring that linked four very different couples would mix history, romance and the major cultural shifts in America during the 20th century and the first decade of the new century.

"Something I really wanted to explore was the importance of objects traveling through time. You can look at (an old) ring with a sense of magic. Where did it come from? What is the story of that ring?," she said.

Sullivan will be talking about "The Engagements" at the Westport Library on Sunday, June 8, and at R.J. Julia Booksellers on Monday, June 9.

The structure of the novel is quite amazing, with the story moving around in time from the 1940s to 2012. One long-married couple is dealing with the impending divorce of their son; a married French woman cheats on her husband with a young American musician; a cash-strapped paramedic in Massachusetts wonders if his marriage is about to unravel; and a young woman in upstate New York, who believes marriage is archaic, finds herself in the middle of planning her cousin's gay wedding.

Sullivan keeps us happily reading the five separate tracks of her novel, building suspense as we begin to wonder what possible connection there could be between these wildly disparate people. The final 50 or 60 pages read like a combination of "Six Degrees of Separation" and "The Red Violin" as everything comes together in a satisfying finale.

When I talked about the suspense in her story, the writer laughed as she recalled working on the mystery of how her stories would connect at the end of the novel.

"The way I wrote it was risky," she said. "I wanted those four different relationships connected by a single ring, but I didn't know how I would connect them -- how to do that and still surprise the reader. I finally thought that the only way I could do it was if I didn't know either. So, for 75 percent of my work, they were stand-alone novellas. It was only at the very, very end that (the connection was made) and it wasn't pre-determined. I was really figuring it out as I went along."

One of the biggest challenges in "The Engagements" was to present a real person -- Frances Gerety -- in the context of Sullivan's fiction. The writer drew on her background as a journalist to research the advertising woman's life, talking to many people who knew and worked with her, and visiting the suburban Philadelphia home and Merion Golf Club where important scenes take place.

"I felt an enormous responsibility to get her as accurate as humanly possible. Not all writers who do this sort of thing feel this ... you can fictionalize. But with Frances I felt it was especially important to be accurate because she was someone many people have never heard of," Sullivan said.

"I really fell in love with her. The more I knew about her -- and what a very private person she was -- the more I had the sense that I needed to be accurate," she added.